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Wonders whether companies actually have employees best interests at heart across physical, mental and spiritual spheres. Posits that most organizations ignore their workforce – not even, in many cases, describing workers as assets! Describes many studies to back up this claim in theis work based on the 2002 Employment Research Unit Annual Conference, in Cardiff, Wales.

This case study examines whether an academic listserv functions primarily as a medium for progressive discourse in which enacted power relations are collaborative or primarily as a medium for discourse in which norms are unilaterally established and off‐line hierarchical power relations are re‐enacted. A few instances of progressive norm setting and other indicators of collaborative power relations were found. However, findings overall suggest that the hierarchical power relations of the college context were re‐enacted in the listserv as revealed by the manner in which the discourse was patterned by gender, rank, and role.

Knowledge, as represented in the history of ideas and in studies of knowledge paradigms and bibliographical structures, appears coherent and rationalistic. By examining the work of the French historian and philosopher Michel Foucault, this view is discussed. Special attention is given, in any cultural or scientific interpretation of an age, to the need to get behind the dominant or hegemonistic body of institutionalized and documented knowledge. We need to investigate the assumptions and underlying influences on the ways in which discourse embody and shape meanings. What preconceptually underpins, we might ask, what people know as knowledge. Important links between language, truth and power are examined, and these are major concerns for Foucault. It is argued that Foucault's ‘archaeological’ and ‘genealogical’ insights into the nature of warranted knowledge are crucial for an understanding of the communication process and the knowledge‐organizing activities of information specialists.

Design and construction of indexing languages require thorough knowledge and understanding of the information environment. This empirical study investigated a mixed set of methods (group interviews, recollection of information needs and word association tests to collect data; content analysis and discourse analysis to analyse data) to evaluate whether these methods collected the data needed for work domain oriented thesaurus design. The findings showed that the study methods together provided the domain knowledge needed to define the role of the thesaurus and design its content and structure. The study was carried out from a person‐insituation perspective. The findings reflected the information environment and made it possible to develop a thesaurus according to the characteristics of the work domain. It seemed more difficult to capture the needs of the individual user and adapt the thesaurus to individual characteristics.

The concept of culture is defined in several ways in different contexts. In the case study of Old Paukku (1993-2003) the actors were using the word “culture” in their argumentation in several ways. The discourses were varying and developing during the planning, decision-making and re-building process. The word “culture” may not be “swear word like in old times” - this was how a local politician told me in the interview - but still it's not a blessing either. Anyway “the cultural heritage (of the built environment)” seems to arouse same suspicions nowadays as “the culture” earlier. The local authorities (i.e. the town municipalities as actor in the culoture life) and the industry (i.e. the organisation of local entrepreneurs as actor) seemed at first to be heading towards different courses in the planning and developing project of the old factory area. In the beginning of the research period many different discourses of cultural policy (DCP) and town planning strategies (TPS) prevailed. There were a lot of talk about the image in the economics and cultural heritage sites on the national level. In this paper I shall clarify how the process and the discourses during the process were changing and how Old Paukku (the old factory) was developed into “a cultural heritage site” in these discourses. The word discourse' is explicated here in the Foucaldian meaning and it is condequently including the ‘power’.

Grid‐group analysis is grounded in a humanistic conception of social science but, it is argued, it has flaws when applied to the analysis of the environmental movement. Environmentalism is not “border” country particularly as existing only in opposition to a “centre”. Grid‐group analysis loses clarity when forced into a “border versus centre” format. And the grid‐group analysis of sub‐cultures is not sufficiently well developed; the lack of a clear holistic frame plays havoc with efforts to derive solid policy.

To provide insight into young people’s attitudes toward community, place, and public discourse on youth and the environment, and to constructively situate the concept of “a sense of place” within these insights for critical pedagogy and community development.

This project utilizes a grounded theory approach to identify salient themes in young people’s expressions of place relationships through poetry. About 677 poems about “local watersheds” written by youth aged 5–18 for the River of Words Poetry Contest between 1996 and 2009 are analyzed using poetic and content analysis.

Findings include the importance of place experiences that employ risk-taking and play, engage central family relationships, and provide access to historical and political narratives of place for the development of constructive place relationships. We also present findings regarding emotions in the sample, showing changing levels of hope and idealism, sadness, pessimism, and other emotions as expressed in the poems.

Using poetic analysis to study attitudes, values, and feelings is a promising method for learning more about the perceptions and values of individuals that affect their self-efficacy and agency.

Engaging youth as active participants and empathetic knowledge-creators in their own places offers one opportunity for critical reflective development in order to combat and reframe disempowering public discourses about young people and their relationships to nature and community. Educators can use this research to adapt contextually and emotionally rooted methods of place-based learning with their students.

The paper uses a nontraditional, mixed methods approach to research and a unique body of affective data. It makes a strong argument for reflective, experiential, and critical approaches to learning about nature and society issues in local contexts.

Ecotourism is a burgeoning sector of the tourism industry offering a relatively guilt-free environment in which to satisfy the desire for travel and adventure. The discourse is firmly entrenched within the dominant conception of sustainability where nature is seen as a privileged ‘other’, untouched by humans. This ideology is also prevalent in the design of ecotourism facilities, which are generally predicated on a model of minimal intervention. This low-impact approach is not problematic in itself, but it misses the opportunity to engage in a more productive and ‘regenerative’ relationship with place. Conversely, Philip Cox Richardson Taylor's design for the resort town of Yulara in central Australia sought a more constructive relationship with place and questioned the conventional notion of ‘resort’. Although this resort, constructed in 1984, predates the current ecotourism industry and certification programs, it remains an early exemplar of innovations in this area and offers the benefits of hindsight. Through an exploration of the ideals and realities of the design and subsequent occupation of Yulara, this paper questions the potential challenges and opportunities of the design of ecotourism facilities to engage in a more ‘regenerative’ agenda. In particular, it identifies the social context and consideration of spatial practice as a key area of opportunity for the built environment to contribute to the ecotourism goal of interpretation and education through a more reflexive form of environmental awareness.

Capacity development in fragile environments in Africa has often proven to be a complex undertaking. This has largely been because of existing knowledge gaps on what exactly causes fragility of states, the economy and society. The liberal peace development model that generally informs post‐conflict reconstruction and capacity development has a limited conception of fragility by narrowly focusing on the national dimensions of the problem, promoting donor‐driven solutions, emphasizing minimal participation of beneficiary actors in the identification and prioritization of capacity development needs, and by subcontracting the design and management of projects and programs. The resulting capacity development impact has generally been disappointing. In the absence of homegrown strategic plans, stakeholder participation and ownership, international development partners have all too often addressed capacity gaps by financing training, supply of equipment and professional exchanges of parliamentarians and parliamentary staffers. These efforts usually achieved their presumed number targets but tended to ignore addressing the larger issues of political economy within which capacity development take place. However, the recent re‐conceptualization of parliamentary capacity development as a development of nationally owned, coordinated, harmonized, and aligned development activities seems to be gaining growing attention in Africa. As the experience of Rwanda eloquently demonstrates, capacity development is essentially about politics, economics and power, institutions and incentives, habits and attitudes – factors that are only partly susceptible to technical fixes and quantitative specifications. These structural factors have to be negotiated carefully and tactfully.